


a version of you

by Caissa



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Memory Palace Shenanigans, red dragon arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 23:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12641871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caissa/pseuds/Caissa
Summary: Imprisoned within the BSHCI, Hannibal seeks Bedelia in his memory palace.





	a version of you

 Hannibal walks down the chapel’s empty nave, turning left into the dimly lit transept. It may be one of the less frequently visited corridors of his memory palace, but no less beloved. There, between the Black Madonna and the stained glass window of Santa Chiara, he finds the door he seeks. No—the door he  _needs_. This one is made of bronze, forbidding and formidable, much like the woman behind it.

He briefly thinks of knocking for verisimilitude’s sake, but doesn’t. Instead he lets himself in, leaving the Normal Chapel behind as he crosses the threshold, spiraling further and further in the nautilus shell of his memory palace. Physically his body is still in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, with its perpetual institutional stink of body odor, bleach, and desperation. Psychically he is in Bedelia’s cool and elegant home, the faint smell of lilac hanging in the air. The room is bathed in late afternoon sunlight, weak yet still warm, the kind common in the first few weeks of December. It is always early winter in Bedelia’s house, a world poised between the last leaves of autumn’s brilliance and the anticipation of the first snowfall.

He steps in to the sunken living room, unbuttoning his teal and grey tweed jacket, to take his usual seat opposite his therapist.

“This always goes better if I’m perfectly honest with you,” she says, reciting her familiar verse.

“I am in need of honesty, today,  _your_ honesty.” He had spent the better part of the week being interviewed by second string doctoral candidates from College Park as punishment for his scathing review of Frederick’s pile of horse manure in paperback form. “What would be the point otherwise.”

“Well, one of us has to be honest,” she says, blue eyes hinting at secrets, and passions, just below the surface. Had he appreciated her eyes enough in these moments? The way her hair glinted gold, that perfect spiral caressing the outline of her slender and swan-like neck. To think he once had the pleasure of her company twice a week for many years, to say nothing of the days and nights spent in each other’s arms in Florence. At the time, it had not been enough for him and he had always been scheming, greedy for more of her. He would give anything for a morsel of her time now.

“I’m honest,” he says. It comes out in a half-strangled sob.

“Not perfectly,” she says.

“As honest as anyone.” He hadn’t been, though. Neither of them had. If they had been truly honest, he does not think either of them would be where they are now. She had hidden her true self from him, but he was the one who had forced her to hide.

“Not really,” she says, a perfect clockwork Bedelia, right on cue. “I have conversations with a version of you, and hope the actual you gets what he needs.”

“No,” Hannibal says, tears dripping down his face now, real hot tears. “It is I who have conversations with a version of you, Bedelia. And neither of us get what we need. I am shut away inside a psychiatric hospital but receive no psychiatric care. They poke and prod at my mind, they come to visit the beast in his cage, but they care nothing for the man. My jailers are only slightly better—one analyzes me for his own profit, while the other knows better than to try. The woman who willingly went behind the veil is lost to me for good I fear.”

His eyes are clouded with tears now. He knows Alana and Frederick will see this on the monitors, for though his thoughts may be shielded from them, his physical body is under constant surveillance. Out if the corner of his eye, Bedelia has blurred mid-speech, like an old VHS tape that has been paused. He dabs at his eyes with his pocket square, tears staining the raw silk. It was a fool’s errand to come here today.

“You forget, I see enough of you to see the truth of you. And I still like you,” a cool voice speaks. It is not the voice of the soulless automaton across from him, but Bedelia, the living Bedelia. He turns and sees her glide down the top of the stairs.

“I have often dreamed of finding you here. I hoped you might build a memory palace of your own one day and that some of our rooms would be the same.” He rises to greet her and takes her hands in his.

“You have hoped correctly,” she says, brushing aside a stray tear with the pad of her thumb. He captures her hand and holds it close to his cheek, reveling in her softness. “I have missed you that much.”

“Why do you not visit me or answer my letters?”

“You know why,” she says, turning away from him to hide her own tears. He will not let her escape so easily in this place, and wraps his arms around her, gathering her close. In the lucid dream of the memory palace she does not fight him and he feels her warmth even if he cannot truly feel her flesh.

“I thought it would be easy to return to the mundane side of the veil. But I feel half in one place, half in another, unfit for my former life.” Her eyes when she turns them on him are a wet, vulnerable ocean blue. Nakedly honest, as they were never for him before. “You have gifted me my freedom, Hannibal, but left me no one to share it with.”

He hears the rebuke in her voice and the regret. “I am sorry, so very sorry, for both of us, Bedelia,” he whispers into her hair, before smoothing it aside to kiss her temple. “But perhaps this room we share may be a small consolation.”

His words seem to soothe her and he can feel her gather herself together, pulling the threads of her own person suit about her tighter. “You came here for therapy,” she says. “What did you want to talk about?”

He smiles a little at that and the session that follows is unlike any they ever had in waking life. He forsakes their chairs in favor of the sofa, tugging her down to sit on his lap. He talks and Bedelia listens as she has always done, but here he rests his head against the soft swell of her breast as he does so, while she combs her fingers through his short hair. She is perfectly his therapist and perfectly his wife as he always wanted her to be. They make new memories together inside their joint memory palace.

Outside Bedelia’s window it has at last begun to snow.

**Author's Note:**

> I've always kind of wondered how exactly the memory palace worked--can Hannibal only relive his memories or can he create new ones? I wanted to play with both here. There's a line at the end of Hannibal the novel where it talks about Clarice building a memory palace of her own where she has rooms she shares with Hannibal so I kind of repurposed that idea for this fic.


End file.
